Applying value judgements to corporate bodies or institutions as if they have individual agency is a fallacy anyways. We should always look at these things materially. "Meta" can't be good or evil, because an idea can't have a morality. It's comprised of the individuals who make the decisions, sure, but those individuals are always going to be motivated by a plethora of reasons which are often contradictory, most notably their material interests.
When we critiqe these sorts of institutions it's important not to prescribe value judgements on them and examine the circumstances of their condition materially.
When the material conditions and the people at the top of all of the corporate world lead to decisions with awful ethical implications there's conclusions that should be reached.
Certainly I agree. Those conclusions, if we take them to their root, can only be that there is some type is systematic deficiency in our socioeconomic order that incentivizes this type of behavior.
Don't mistake my comment for arguing against criticism of institutions, but that arguing whether or not something is "good" or "bad" doesn't draw you to a conclusion that is any more eor less substantive than that analysis.
Would you say it is a fallacy to apply such value judgements to say, the institutions of the National Socialist Party (Nazis), the KKK, the KGB, etc? How about a company whose business was selling slaves?
To be clear, I'm not saying being an employee of Meta is comparable to being a member of the aforementioned groups. But I don't think it is always a fallcy to apply a value judgement to an institution.
Yes, I would. An extremely dangerous and important one to get right in fact.
Let me first clarify what I am not saying. I am not saying that these institutions do not create evil, or commit evil acts and should not be resisted or destroyed. If we truly want these things to stop happening, material analysis is the only way to really address the root of the problem.
We can easily see that fascism was a result of the twisted incentive structure of colonial empire, the evolution of state corporatism as an economic mode, and rabid anti-communism rolled into one, etc etc. What I'm trying to say is that if your take away was just that Hitler was a bad guy and the Nazis were evil (which they very well may be), then you're doomed to repeat these events because this isn't a real analysis. It's not just that he was evil, it's that the socioeconomics lined up in such a way that allowed these things to happen. There will always be bad people seeking to take advantage of conditions, we will never be able to control that. What we can do is apply material analysis to events and try and determine the root cause of them, so we can prevent them from happening again.
What does this have to do with Meta? Well, my point it, Meta doesn't suck because Zuckerberg sucks. He very well may or may not, but that's not alalysis. Meta sucks because the incentive structure surrounding the attention economy is fetid and rotten, and that's a problem with all of us. Thats a problem within our society that allows these types of things to happen, and we ignore that at our own peril, just as we ignore the material reality that lead to the Holocaust by saying it happened because "Hitler and the Nazis were evil and that's that."
Sure, you can say whatever makes you feel better. You can say you're a pirate.
But writing off the mechanisms of large scale institutions as the result of moral actors is reductive and doesn't serve to address the systematic root cause of the issue, and ironically let's these people off the hook by narrowing the focus onto a group of particularly vile individuals. It's the "few bad apples" myth. I many ways, were all complicit. These are all human beings, after all. This is the true face of mankind.
When we critiqe these sorts of institutions it's important not to prescribe value judgements on them and examine the circumstances of their condition materially.